Power Supplies - Update #1

My thinking on the power supplies has evolved.

What I'm considering now is a 400 or 500 VDC power bus (maybe two of them) SCR regulated from a 3 phase power supply. 12 pulse for reduced filtering requirements.

The bus will supply the power for 100 V @ 25 A converters (parallelable) for the magnet supply, and 1,000 V @ 25A converters (series amenable) for the high voltage.

If each converter has its own phase trigger, the phases can be staggered so that the effective ripple frequency will be the drive freq. (around 30 KHz) times the number of converters, times 2 (for full wave rectification). For a 1,000 A @ 100 V magnet supply that puts the ripple up at about 2.4 MHz. Easy to filter. A 20 KV @ 25 A supply would have 20 converters. That would give a 1.2 MHz ripple. A full up 80 KV @ 25 A supply would have 4.8 MHz effective ripple.

Update: 08 July 007 1856z

On the HV side we will also need 24VDC (nominal) @ 25 A to power any controls on the HV side including UC2901 feedback modulators. Plus 120VAC @ 60 Hz 10 KW for misc power. The 24VDC will be battery backed to supply surge currents. There will also be quench SCRs (into resistive loads) for shorting the magnet supply and the HV supply. The resistors to be sized so that the supply output is discharged in .1 second or less to 1/10,000th of the maximum voltage or current.

Update: 09 July 007 0757z

I have been thinking about safety issues. Most notably what happens when utility power is lost? First off if the LN2 pump is pumping it should keep pumping for a few minutes after power loss. Which means battery backup. Second any water cooling must continue for a few minutes after power off. The water chiller need not be backed up. The control computer needs to be battery backed up. In fact it should operate from the battery bus at all times so power glitches do not affect its operation. The same will be true of the data collection computer. In addition a backup generator with a 48 hour gasoline supply should be provided. All important loads should have automatic transfer switches to the backup generator. Power transfer should be sequenced to minimize the surge load on the generator.

Magnet Power Supplies

My plan for the magnet power supplies (100V, 1,000A max) is to use an induction heating power supply to supply the power and use a ferrite transformer for voltage isolation. Followed by rectification and filtering.

Some candidates for the induction heating supply can be found at: Induction heating power supplies.

Since supplies of up to 1.5 MW are standard it may be a good way to develop the high voltage as well.